1. Rossellini's second feature film, belonging to his military trilogy La nave bianca, Un pilota ritorna and L'uomo dalla croce, covering the navy, the air force, and the army.
2. Slightly more story-driven than La nave bianca.
3. The slight narrative is little more than a pretext to portray the state of war.
4. The film is official Fascist war propaganda, but it shows the distaste of the flyers for propaganda, and emphasizes the distress of the homeless and the victims more than the derring-do of the flyers.
5. There is a nominal love interest, but the film emphasizes the gravity of the protagonists. Facing death and responsibility for others dying and wounded they have little energy for romance.
6. Massimo Girotti is quite good as the serious flyer who does what is expected of him but could hardly be less excited about the official causes. His final enigmatic expression is memorable.
7. There are some good Rossellinian sequences: a) the sequence at the well with the long queues, b) the sequence of the amputation of a soldier's leg, c) the sequence of the refugees at the bridge which is blown up by the bomber.
8. There is a lot of aerial footage which gives the film an interesting and different look.
9. There are also many montages with newspaper headlines to cover the progress of the war campaign.
10. As Rossellini scholars have noticed, there are indeed some aspects of ellipse and anti-narrativity here, unfinished business, waiting, and deconstructing classical storytelling.

Antti Alanen & Olaf Möller (ed.): Citizen Peter. Helsinki: Like, 2013. Click on the image to order. 480 pages. 50 top writers. With an English section and full graphies. Published on 14 September, 2013.

Antti Alanen: Elokuvantekijät. Helsinki: Otava, 2012. An encyclopedia of 640 film-makers, published on 19 September 2012.

Antti Alanen (ed.): Elokuva ja psyyke 3: Tarinan lumous. Helsinki: Minerva, 2012. A third anthology of articles and essays on Cinema and the Psyche with the subtitle The Enchantment of the Tale, mostly written by psychoanalysts and psychologists. Published on 16 March, 2012.

About Me

Antti Alanen (born 1955) is Film Programmer at National Audiovisual Institute (Finland), which runs the Cinema Orion in Helsinki. This diary is an irregular notebook of rough notes on films and occasional film-related experiences. Early notes 1963-1970: see January 1971. This blog ran out of labels in October 2009. antti.alanen at gmail.com